Till Or Cash Register

In the UK shoppers will talk about going to the ‘till’ to pay for their purchases.” But the term “till,” will leave people outside the UK bemused, that is  until they realise the item being referred to is actually the cash register.

But why do people in the UK refer to a ’till’ as opposed to a ‘cash register?” Unfortunately there probably aren’t too many people in the UK either who are aware of its origins. One theory is that the term refers to the till being a compartment in a storage container, where items are kept separate from one another. Certainly a cash register does that, as notes and coins of different denominations are segregated in different compartments. Whatever the reason, the word “till” is in common parlance among shoppers in the UK.

Stores and businesses use cash registers to perform the dual actions of recording purchases and issuing receipts. But it is interesting to note that the cash register was actually invented as anti-theft device by a fed up bar owner in the United States.

John Ritter, the owner of bar in Ohio, was eager to find away of deterring his bar staff from taking their pick of the day’s takings. In 1879 Ritter produced his first cash register and filed a patent to protect his invention in 1883 along with his brother, John.

In an added twist to the story, Ritter based his first cash register on an instrument is steam ships which counted the number of revolutions in the water made by the ship’s propeller. For reasons best known to himself, Ritter quickly sold his new cash register company. Within a year. Within a year the cash register company was in new hands again, this time being bought by the National Cash register Company – now known as NCR. And the National Cash Register Company (who are now known as NCR) turnover billions of dollars in revenue every year.

And it was the National Cash Register Company (NCRC) that took Ritters basic invention and refined it to include the standard components we are used to seeing today. Before the end of the nineteenth century the NCRC had added a paper roll to the machine in order to create a record of each transaction. This obviously became known as producing a receipt.

1906 saw the next major innovation with the cash register when Charles Kelling introduced a motorised version. This development prove to be huge and saw NCRC able to increase its workforce in the United States to over 6,000 within five years. Kettering was to leave NCRC and set up a firm in the nascent car industry, General Motors. This goes to show the abundance of entrepreneurial talent among the early developers of the cash register.

No matter what you call his invention, cash register or till, John Ritter could never in his wildest dreams  have foreseen the impact of his invention when he first introduced it all those years back in 1879.